Between the silent hours of 2 to 4am on April 19th 2016, my life changed forever. As seminal moments go, it was a relatively quiet one. I woke up in a cold sweat, was consumed by a rage of anxiety, thought my life was about to end, thought about ending it, came to some type of sense and perspective, returned to bed, slept fitfully without anybody being aware of my crisis, and then made an appointment to see my GP as soon as was possible.

Sometime later…

It sounded like a crow, a passing squawk and flap of wings. Crows do not promise half full glasses. Crickets began their digital chorus and my wife stirred. She would be getting up for work; I would be staying at home. The church bells rang out mournfully as part of the awakening.

These were my first few weeks of not being in work. To make it worse, these were my first few weeks of not being a teacher. I had left after spending a number of months off with anxiety disorder. It came on quickly, during the night, forcing me from sleep and providing a nightmare scenario that was all too real. Examination deadlines had been missed. I spent an hour contemplating my professional demise; another failure falling into a life full of failures.

It took me some time to realise that it was not true. I hadn’t dreamt it, but it was tangible. I could taste the fear in the same way that I can taste it now. My life changed after that night.

A couple of days later, I was sitting in front of my doctor. Another malingerer, another teacher bleating about the pressure of the job, I thought I heard her thinking. I was making my case, believing that without it I would be back in the madness again. I talked and talked, explaining the circumstances. She listened. I talked some more. Then, she asked me if I had ever considered harming myself. My answer didn’t need any dramatic delivery.

“Every night, when I wake up at the same time, I think about putting a gun to my head.”

I consider the sweet kiss of cold metal against my temple and the little effort it would take to squeeze the trigger. Bang. I don’t know if the dead hear the echoes of their lives as they dissipate into the yawn of eternal indifference, but bang seemed appropriate.

Her eyes were upon me.

“What stops you?”

“I love my wife and children too much.”

She didn’t need convincing.

“I am going to sign you off from today.”

My doctor discussed medication, explained that I was ill, and gave me a dose of resigned sympathy. Her parents had been teachers and her friends were teachers, or had been before they took retirement as early as they could. It was the same in her profession. “Burn out,” she called it. I understood. I was done with teaching. The last few years had been a prelude to this moment of realisation. It wasn’t so much that I was experiencing an epiphany, rather an opening of my eyes and the realisation of the smouldering stubble that surrounded me.

When my doctor was filling in the reason for my illness, she asked me if ‘anxiety disorder’ was okay to write down as the cause. I agreed.

As soon as I got out of the surgery, I phoned my wife. My initial sick note was for two weeks. Ironically, I was on the second week of my Easter break. Bloody teachers, eh? Sophie, my wife, was not surprised to hear my news. We arranged to meet for coffee, a place to talk out of earshot of our children and the place I chose was a cycling cafe, a sport that I professed interest in but hadn’t really done for the best part of seven months. Indeed, I had done precious little of anything outside of work in the time since I had taken up a post as Head of English in a failing school that still thought of itself as a bastion of education. My department was full of bastions. As luck would have it, the first person that I saw as I entered the cafe was another member of SLT. He too was a cyclist and never seemed to have any problem indulging his habit. A quick smile of recognition from me was followed by the dropping eyes of the psychologically guilty. Fortunately, my wife arrived and we found a quiet table.

“Two weeks? Well that’s a result.”

“Yes,” I nodded. “She doesn’t think that I am mentally well enough to be in the classroom.”

“I agree with her. What did you have to do though, put your underpants on your head?”

“No underpants needed. She just looked at me, listened to me, and signed the sick note.”

“So, she thinks you’re mad?”

“I think so.”

“She should have asked me, I could’ve told her.”

Sophie has always maintained that I was mad even when I was going through good times. It wasn’t the type of zany mad that lots of sane people like to label themselves as, but that heavy cloud of not being quite right mad which refused to stop following me around.

“But what did you tell her?”

“Oh, just the usual, the not sleeping and all that.”

“Was that all? I don’t sleep. She never gave me time off when I went to see her. Knitting, she said, or cake baking.”

“She prescribed two lots of tablets and said that I would be on them for quite a long time.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I just said that I couldn’t sleep. I told her about the panic attack. I told her about work.”

“What else?”

“Oh, I said that I sometimes dream of putting a gun to my head.”

“You said what?”

“Sometimes, most times when I wake up at night I think about committing suicide. I have an image of holding a gun and pulling the trigger.”

“You don’t, do you?”

My eyes fell to the coffee sitting before me. I did not want anybody to see or hear me.

“Yes.”

There are few words you can say to the person who loves you that can compensate for confessing that thoughts of suicide were never that far away from your mind. I wanted to say that I wouldn’t ever do anything like that. I loved Sophie and our girls. I wanted to say that it was just the confusion of a man who was not sleeping. I wanted to reassure her that everything was well and that this was just a temporary thing. I wanted, but I couldn’t.

“I’m sorry that you married such a fucking fuck-wit.”

“Don’t speak like that.”

“See you later, Matt,” came the goodbye of my colleague. I smiled goodbye and took a deep breath. “Sod’s Law. Somebody from work.”

2.

The medication that I was prescribed turned out to be Fluoxetine and Diazepam. The first is a general anti-depressant and the second is a much stronger drug that renders the user somewhat immune to the goings-on around them. I was told not to drive or attempt to teach with the big D in my system.

In the A-Z of drugs, Fluoxetine is described as a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSR) antidepressant. It affects chemicals in the brain that may unbalance people with depression, panic, anxiety, or obsessive-compulsive disorder. Finally, I was part of a club, not a very exclusive club, but a recognised order of disorder. Diazepam, on the other hand, is another fish. a pretty big one at that; and not a fish that many can swallow. The big D is your Tenants Super of treatments. Again though, it is quite widely taken which may explain those dead and drifting eyes that wander the aisles of major supermarket outlets. My first contact with this one was accompanied by a feeling not dissimilar to throwing oneself off a great height and into a vat of not quite set jelly. After a very short while, I felt that I was walking within a membrane that managed to keep the world out and me safe. That must be how babies feel when they are still in the womb. No wonder each of my girls fought the birthing process, with the younger ones staying longer and longer still away from the whole business of coming into the world.

In a matter of three to four days my wife’s husband, and my children’s father, had moved from a twitchingly accurate impersonation of Stephen King’s caretaker in The Shining to a man who walked and talked in jelly. If carefree means free of all cares, then I was that; a medically enhanced twig floating on the river of life. It was a good thing that I was not allowed in school at that point as twigs tend to snap underfoot in such crowded environments.

So, after becoming a benign cast member of The Walking Dead, I was a happy soul, if one considers happiness to be born out of indifference. Actually, that’s not fully correct. One could never be carefree or indifferent if one lived opposite a neighbour whose right-wing views, privileged past, and belief in men having a steely spine and a stiff upper lip, was the dogma that ruled her personal judgements. It was the omnipresence of this said neighbour, forever peeking from her sentry position in the front bedroom, that kept me tied down. I was reduced to making dashes to the car or sneaking into the garage to quickly grab my bike before setting off at a pace up the avenue.

It was the latter activity that began to return me to some less drug-induced form of equilibrium. I had missed cycling and the peace it brought me. The place where I live is blessed with a low population, only few big towns and the secret of its Wolds. When I am on my bike, I am young again. Cycling recycles my distant memories and feeds them into my older state.

Share this:

Like this:

LikeLoading...

Related

Published by mike2all

This is the story of what happened to me when anxiety took a grip. I lost my senses, I lost my job, and I lost me. I then turned to writing to find those things that had gone missing.
How can you teach when you believe that education is a business that is failing in its primary remit of helping to create a better society? Indeed, how can you teach when you believe that you have nothing of value to pass on?
The book/blog is the story of my recovery from the absolute darkness of the early days. It is an Odyssey through my life over the last twelve months and a retracing of my steps to discover how I found myself there. More than all of that, it is a re-evaluation and a rejoicing of all that which I call life.
Happy reading and I hope it helps.
There is madness, Everyday Madness, and not all of it comes from within.
View all posts by mike2all

An honest and forensic examination of a life in crisis. As a teacher, I unfortunately know many colleagues in similar states of despair and depression. Some have left the profession (pushed or jumped), whilst others have found a path through the mire. This piece lays out the inconvenient truth…

Fascinating insight into what can happen to anyone of us at any point in our lives. I’d like to think that reading this could help people feel less alone and helpless. I understand how the cycling would help, my own weapon against the stress is running but has the same effect.
I look forward to reading more

I felt I was there with you. I can only empathise on the truth of this subject matter having witnessed its devastation at first hand with other dear friends. Good luck with the book. It is an important subject matter as in one phrase you mention that the old teachers are looked upon as being rebellious. Maybe what is gone is the freedom of speech and the freedom of creativity.

I think being a teacher would be tough. I am a numbers girl by day and deal with some people but overall not even remotely the same as dealing with a classroom/school.
I can’t imagine sitting across from my husband and hearing him say he had thoughts like that. Has to be heartbreaking both ways. I am not a writer or anything like that so writing styles and technical stuff like that…. I can’t tell you much about stuff like that. My attention was captivated in the first paragraph and continued until the end.

You have a very compelling story. It reads very much like a book, rather than a blog, and I hope that is your intention. For myself, I usually don’t read too many blog posts that are 1000 words or more, it’s just a matter of time. I started writing my own blog, and as time went on, did quite a lot of editing. Now, on average, my blog posts are 300-400 words or less, it seems to work best for me.

One tip that I learned early on in this process. Instead of leaving it “Uncategorized”, use tags/categories to get your work more exposure, but not more than 10, or does not make it to the WordPress reader. Here, maybe a few could be Teaching, Burnout, Counseling, Cycling, Anxiety, Dreams, Stephen King, etc.

Thank you. I decided to blog my book I order to ‘get it out there’ and then decided or became addicted to blogging. It is heartening that people such as you stop by to read and comment. Top vanbytheriver man.

Hello! I’ve just read your article in ‘The Teacher’ magazine and I enjoyed it so much, I ended up here! I love both the honesty in here and I think it’s something that a lot of teachers will understand all too well. Hope you’re doing better now. Awesome blog 🙂

P.S medically enhanced twig floating on the river of life – I laughed SO LOUDLY here!

It came from the heart and the head as I was trying to put back together a life that had been smashed into smithereens. Bit over the top, but it felt like that. I am only just getting myself back. I still dread going back into the classroom even though I am thought of a being a really decent teacher (that should be judgement speak). Anyway, it’s Friday and that means that I have the wealth of the weekend in which to recover and dream. One would never believe that I used to ply my trade as an education consultant. Life is little joker whose favourite garb is irony.

I know a lot of incredible teachers that have fought similar battles. The workload and constant pressures creates anxiety in even the most resilient folk. Great to share your story and give hope to others! And yes…. Spring in Yorkshire looks a lot like Winter to me! Pretty beautiful though!

Wow.
You have me in tears, then you save me with your sneaky humour.
I’m going to have to share this one Mike.
You’ve shown your soul; your battle. While many recognise and sympathesize I want others to ‘hear’ your voice. The one that WILL finish writing the book. 🌸👏🏼